2019 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 vs. 2018 Porsche 911 GT2 RS

From the August 2018 issueRivalries never rest. A Bostonian’s contempt for New York doesn’t stop at baseball. Even when the Bears are garbage, the Packers don’t phone it in. The Wendy’s Twitter account won’t back down just because the McDonald’s social-media team can’t field a comeback.

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Corvette versus 911 is no different. This 53-year-old battle will never be over, and at the moment, the competition is as fierce as it’s ever been. With the near simultaneous releases of the 755-hp Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 and the 700-hp Porsche 911 GT2 RS, we’re witnessing the ultimate showdown of the ultimate automotive adversaries. Here, these icons transcend their stations as sports cars to become legitimate supercars, each carrying a sticker price roughly three times that of the entry car on which it’s based.

With great power comes great irresponsibility. Both of these cars wrangle their starts-with-a-seven power outputs with carbon-ceramic brakes, Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires, and tall carbon-fiber wings to keep them planted. They perform at the contemporary limits of a street car’s capabilities. One will accelerate to 60 mph quicker than any other rear-wheel-drive car we’ve tested. The other brakes and corners on par with the stickiest street cars. You can understand how we were driven to do rash and impulsive things—such as stage a comparison test of two cars with sticker prices separated by $204,920.

What appear to be the GT2 RS’s tailpipes are dummies mounted to the rear fascia. That’s out of character for a product of Porsche’s GT department.

Car and DriverGreg Pajo

Yes, we took some liberties with this one. If we had let the Car and Driver Indecision Vanquisher do its thing, the Chevy would have taken 20 points in the price category to the Porsche’s negative nine. That would have ended this face-off before it started. So we halved the price category to 10 points. The Corvette gets 10 points, the 911 gets one. You can direct your outrage toward your local congressperson.

The 911 GT2 RS’s base price of $294,250 rapidly inflates with a short but steep options list. The $18,000 Weissach package trims 13.4 pounds with a handful of carbon-fiber bits—roof, anti-roll bars, paddle shifters—in place of standard metal pieces. A $13,000 set of magnesium wheels knocks off another 25 pounds. British Racing Green paint ($12,830), a front-axle lifter ($3490), a leather-and-Alcantara interior ($3480), a Bose stereo ($1600), and a few sub-$1000 extras bring the final price to $348,730.

What’s the right piece of asphalt to exercise 700 or more horsepower on track rubber? A world-class road course, obviously. Our annual Lightning Lap test will reveal what these cars can do around Virginia International Raceway, but you’ll have to wait for our October issue to see how that went. For the moment, we’re celebrating them in all of their road-legal excess. As preposterous as these two supercars may be, they’ve both cleared the hurdles of the EPA, NHTSA, and their respective corporate legal teams to earn their license plates. We programmed the nav systems for Charleston, West Virginia, where, after three days in the Car and Driver comparison-test coal mines, we emerged with a new champion. For now.

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The Corvette can hardly contain this much performance. Just look at how major the exterior modifications are: The front splitter hangs from a fascia that is effectively one huge grille, the two-position rear wing forces you to load cargo from the side of the car, and the hood has been hole-punched to make 755 horsepower fit. Five years into production, the C7 Corvette is so saturated with speed that the engineers have run out of room under the hood and in the wheel wells to make it quicker.

Chevy’s tray table has annoying drink-spilling bumps.

Car and DriverGreg Pajo

For a car that is literally overflowing with juice, the ZR1 drives remarkably like the Corvette Stingray that makes 300 less horsepower. You’ll recognize the ZR1 as a Vette by its steady front-end grip, its faithful steering, and the ease with which it attacks the road. Seated relatively far back in the car, you feel rotation at the rear end instantly, long before the yaw can gather any tree-bashing momentum.

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The LT5 V-8 idles with an offshore-speedboat burble that erupts at the slightest poke of the throttle. In full fury, the ZR1’s pyrotechnic thunder so completely fills the atmosphere that there’s no air left to carry the supercharger’s whine. The blower is unmistakable, though, in the way the ZR1 marries the instant response of a naturally aspirated engine with the fat torque band of forced induction. It’s a forgiving personality that will yank hard in any gear at any speed, which is that much more useful because the ZR1’s lazy eight-speed automatic wouldn’t earn a passing grade in a minivan. You can count a whole Mississippi between pulling a shift paddle and powering toward the horizon on the next gear. Another reason to opt for the seven-speed manual.

Car and DriverGreg Pajo

The ZR1 isn’t the race-car wannabe that the GT2 RS is, then. Chevrolet coddles buyers with available luxuries such as heated and ventilated seats, a power-adjustable steering column, and a team of cameras watching over the carbon-fiber splitter. All these creature comforts do have a downside, however. The ZR1 earns the sad distinction of being the heaviest of the seventh-gen Corvettes, and at 3659 pounds, our test car weighed almost 300 pounds more than the GT2 RS.

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The chassis is mostly indifferent to that additional mass, as the ZR1 delivers organ-scrambling grip even on an off day. Wearing a set of ragged Michelins that looked as if they’d done a stint at Sebring before rolling up to our office, the ZR1 lapped the skidpad at 1.16 g’s of lateral stick. It stopped from 70 mph in 127 feet. And it outpaced the Porsche in the slalom, helped by the stability of a wheelbase that’s 10.1 inches longer and the car’s nearly equal front/rear weight distribution.

This monster is made even more docile with Chevrolet’s five-mode Performance Traction Management system, which can coach drivers to track-day heroics via a progressively more permissive safety net. But the launch-control algorithm fails to make the most effective use of the supercharged V-8’s 715 pound-feet of torque for straight-line runs. For the quickest time, it’s on the driver to roll into the throttle, modulate the pedal, and time the upshifts with machinelike precision. On a 93-degree day, the ZR1 knocked out a 3.1-second zero-to-60-mph run, a half-second behind the 911 GT2 RS. Through the quarter-mile, the Corvette’s 11.0-second run was 0.7 second off the 911’s. The only human that stands a chance at beating Porsche’s effortless launch control is a Chevy engineer programming the advanced traction-control software that this ZR1 deserves.

Car and DriverGreg Pajo

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We’ll admit that we didn’t just measure the Corvette against the 911 GT2 RS in scoring this comparo. Driving the ZR1, we couldn’t shake thoughts of the former Big Kahuna Corvette, the 650-hp Z06. We have now tested two different ZR1s on three different days in two different states with two different drivers. The top-line takeaway has been the same every time: We’ve yet to corner harder or accelerate to 60 mph quicker in the ZR1 than in the Corvette Z06 armed with the Z07 package. The ZR1 in this comparison test did nick its little brother in stopping distance by a single foot. One foot and $32,210—they’re what separate a ZR1 with the ZTK Track Performance package from a Z07-equipped Corvette Z06.

Shy of putting legitimate race rubber on the Corvette, it appears Chevy is up against the limits of the front-engine C7 chassis. The ZR1, then, is the perfect justification for why Chevrolet will soon trade 65 years of front-engine sports-car excellence to challenge the mid-engine status quo. If that next Vette is anything like this ZR1—a world-class performer on a blue-collar budget—the future rivalry might just be Corvette versus Ferrari.

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To recognize the 911 GT2 RS as the $348,730 bargain that it actually is, you just need to frame the car correctly. Mostly, that means removing the Corvette ZR1 from the picture. Here we have the Nürburgring Nordschleife production-car lap-record holder built with carbon-fiber anti-roll bars and end links, magnesium wheels, and a titanium exhaust. The exotic brands could charge a million bucks for this pedigree, and yet, with a Porsche badge, it comes with a $650,000 discount for looking a bit froggier than your average McLaren or Ferrari.

We’ve yet to experience truly comfortable fixed-back seats. Carbon-fiber fetishists will find much to lust after on the GT2 RS.

Car and DriverGreg Pajo

The British Racing Green paint—and the constant presence of a Sebring Orange ZR1—rendered the GT2 RS invisible to locals on our tour of coal country. To the untrained eye, it’s easy to miss the radical form in the functional bits such as the louvered front fender vents and the NACA hood ducts that feed cool air to the brakes. The focus is so tight that what appears to be badging on the GT2 is just decals, and the grilles resemble chicken wire. Porsche’s RS cars get away with this because it all falls within the spirit of weight reduction, an exercise that keeps the GT2 within 73 pounds of a 911 Carrera with the dual-clutch automatic.

For decades now, Porsche sports cars have only bitten their most unskilled pilots, and this one is no different. On the skidpad, where the GT2 RS recorded 1.12 g’s of grip, the limit is clearly demarcated by benign understeer. Like all 911s, though, the GT2 pays close attention to how you load and unload its tires. It comes alive when you call the more advanced plays. Trail-brake into a curve or back out of the throttle midcorner, and the nose bites and the rear end unsticks. On the second half of our slalom, where the cone spacing shrinks from 90 feet to 50 through the last five cones, it takes steady hands and a sure foot to simultaneously corner and slow the GT2 without turning the flat-six into a pendulum that’s been cut loose.

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Car and DriverGreg Pajo

If that sounds like a handful, well, that’s exactly what the GT2 RS is not. Rooted by its firm brake pedal and precise steering, the GT2 RS ties a great road together with its responsive fluidity. And where the Corvette needs to be uncorked to fully appreciate its specialness, the Porsche’s air of completeness is palpable at any speed. The seven-speed dual-clutch automatic is as impressive choosing gears in city traffic as it is cracking from first to second at 7000 rpm.

Squeezing its 700 horsepower from a 3.8-liter flat-six, the GT2 RS doesn’t have the off-idle response of the ZR1—or even of a suburbia-optimized crossover, for that matter. Variable-geometry turbos pull the 553-lb-ft torque plateau down to 2500 rpm, below which there’s an initial whiff of turbo lag. Keep the power primed with the carbon-fiber shift paddles or the PDK Sport mode, however, and the GT2 RS slingshots from a steady cruise to violent speeds without hesitation.

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In the sweltering afternoon heat of our instrumented testing, the GT2’s intercooler misters sprayed enough distilled water that the car asked for a refill of its 1.3-gallon tank before we were done. That thirst begat an impressive consistency. With a 5000-rpm windup, Porsche’s launch control placed all 14 of our acceleration runs within 0.2 second of one another. At 2.6 seconds, the GT2’s zero-to-60-mph sprint goes on record as being the quickest we have ever measured from a rear-wheel-drive car. Its heady quarter-mile—10.3 seconds at 140 mph—is one tick behind that of the lighter and more powerful McLaren 720S. And where the Corvette ZR1 slows noticeably as it runs into a wall of air at triple-digit speeds, the 911’s intensity never fades.

Car and DriverGreg Pajo

The GT2 RS is not a daily driver. With the exhaust in sport mode, the flat-six bounces a subdued warble off the Gorilla Glass rear window during overrun. Compared with the firecracker staccato of a Chevy small-block V-8, though, the Porsche speaks in a monotonous drone that can become taxing on the highway. Inside, the sculptural carbon-fiber buckets are reasonably wide and well padded, but like every fixed-back seat we’ve ever sampled, they’re incompatible with public-school posture. Facing the 350-mile drive home from Charleston to Ann Arbor, we desperately wished for the 18-way adjustable sport seats that Porsche offers as an alternative.

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Even given its stratospheric cost, we never doubted the GT2 RS’s price or value proposition the same way we did the Corvette’s. Its position as the sharpest knife in the deep 911 drawer is clear and unassailable. The GT2’s ability to inspire confidence and speed is matched by few other cars, most of them costing roughly $350,000, too. So Porsche scores a narrow victory this time. But we already know Chevrolet is readying for the next round.